In a decision unlikely to be welcomed by SAP, Rimini Street is extending support coverage for all SAP ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA releases to 2040.

The company, which provides third-party support for Oracle, SAP, VMware and other software, said today that it can do this “without any need to complete a migration to S/4HANA on RISE as required by SAP for clients.”

The move comes after SAP said  in January that it would not change its 2027 date to end support for ageing ECC and R3 ERP systems. (SAP’s Mainstream Maintenance for ECC 6.0 ends by 2027, but for those on enhancement packs 0-5, the end date is December 31, 2025.)

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SAP S/4HANA also has several releases where mainstream maintenance has already ended or will end this year, in 2026, or 2027. SAP’s own Extended Maintenance is available for “some versions of ECC 6.0 and S/4HANA, but not all, and at a significant cost increase”, says Rimini Street.

It has a list of maintenance end dates here. 

“The end of maintenance by 2027 will not be changed,” said CEO Christian Klein bluntly on a Q4 call. But a new  “SAP ERP, private edition, transition option” will, however, give some Very Special customers a further three years to modernise after the 2030 cut-off for extended support, a spokesperson suggested; helping them modernise through to 2033.

The programme, said Klein, is “reaching out with a helping hand to a very few large customers” struggling to get modernised by the 2030 cut-off for extended support. “Because to transform and consolidate ERP and business processes in over 100 countries is sometimes not that easy…”

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Not everyone is able to justify the business case for a major migration with very specific requirements from SAP however. Rimini Street said that its support extension “applies to both current and new clients who are seeking to drive maximum ROI out of their SAP software investment.”

It claims that customers “enjoy total annual maintenance savings of up to 90% and avoid the cost and risks of a low-value migration to S/4HANA.”

“According to industry analysts, an estimated 20,000 SAP ECC licensees have not even licensed S/4HANA, and many of those who have licensed S/4HANA still have not completed an S/4HANA or S/4HANA on RISE migration,” said Seth Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street in a canned statement.

“There is no need for SAP licensees to undergo major costs, risks and disruption to their operations for a software migration that many believe is unnecessary and low value, compared to the value of investing in new technologies like enterprise AI, workflow and task automation – that can bring immediate value to the organization,” he added today. 

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